Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Our first tailgate market of the season was yesterday afternoon, and it was fabulous.

I harvested greens all morning while Christopher washed and prepped produce, dug spring garlic, and loaded the truck.

It's nice to feel like all of the gardening madness is coming to fruition a bit already, with so much food coming out of the hoophouse and kitchen garden beds that we had a bountiful offering at the market.

We sold out of pretty much everything, and loved connecting with the other vendors, friends, dogs, babies, and customers. A cheese and scallion scone from the Herban Baker with a dollop of Wild Ramp Goat Cheese from 3 Graces Dairy topped off the day.

Today the rush continues: after I squeeze in a little non-farm work this morning, I'll be back at it in the garden, planting potatoes, giving all of the seedlings a little fish emulsion/kelp snack, potting up perennial herbs for the herb festival, and watering, which is a monumental task at this stage with all of the thousands of thirsty plant babies in the hoophouse. But yesterday it was nice to pause and reap the rewards.

Friday, April 16, 2010

After a week of cramming in farm and garden work in between taxes, grant reports, and meetings, the next three days are all about the garden.

Genovese Basil seedlngs perched above French heirloom lettuces

Arugula and Mizuna

Today I'll be trellising heirloom blue-podded shell peas (Blauwschokkers, to be exact), planting Red of Tropea onion seedlings (beautiful Italian heirloom red bottle onions that we started from seed back in February), building a bed for brassicas and shallots, pinching flowers off of all of the winter greens that are trying to bolt, cutting potatoes into chunks for planting tomorrow, potting up sorrel plants and Canturbury Bells for the herb show, and watering everything. The watering of everything takes about an hour a day at this point, which is entirely inconvenient but essential.

Onions!

There are thousands of baby plants growing in the hoophouse, on our porches, on our kitchen counters, tucked into every available cranny. Winter-planted lettuce is growing to gargantuan proportions in the unheated hoophouse, spinach and beets are doing their slow and steady thing, chard and collards are kicking out the jams. In other words: it's Spring! Plants are doing what they do best in Springtime: putting on some serious growth.

Italienischer lettuce

This goes for all plants, including the plethora of weeds and wild plants that are sprouting up everywhere I look. Some of these wildsters I'm happy to see: beautiful medicinal agrimony, nourishing dandelion, prolific creasy greens, medicinal nettles. Others I have a love-hate relationship with -- blackberries, lambsquarters, wild onions. I'm grateful for their gifts of food and medicine but I'm tired of pulling them out of my lettuce beds. So I pull some and leave some and turn loose of the ridiculous notion that I can control the force of nature that is plant life.

It's a good metaphor for life in general for me these days - I'm deep in the weeds, best to just take a bite here and there and relish the chaos!

"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace."

~ May Sarton

"To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves."

~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable."

~George Washington Carver

"To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

~Howard Zinn

"I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."

~ Emma Goldman

"What we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy."

~Vandana Shiva

"Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now."

~ Audre Lorde

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

~ Rumi

"A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think."

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things."

~ Elise Boulding

"The beauty of the seed is that out of one you can get millions. The beauty of the pollinator is it turns that one into the million. And that’s an economics of abundance. That’s an economics of sharing. That’s to me the real economics of growth. Because life is growing. The economics and technology of hybridization, of genetic modification is a deliberate creation of scarcity."